PayPal

Monday, September 30, 2013

This book review was originally written in 2008 for another
publication, some time after Diana West's book debuted. The editor of
that publication – who shall remain nameless, as well as the publication itself
– had the hubris to edit my original review out of recognition. I withdrew the
submission and am belatedly publishing it now.

The trouble with most conservatives who write cultural
critiques is that invariably they get it only half right, or just backwards.
Diana West’s The
Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down
Western Civilization is not a salutary instance of that failing. West is
not your typical "conservative." She has analytical and observational
skills that surpass those of the typical conservative. She is acutely
intelligent and a superb writer. Most average "conservatives" I have dubbed
"CINOs" – Conservatives in Name Only – because like many political
conservatives, they invariably endorse or side with the liberal/left welfare
statists, in spite of their religious bent or allegiance to
"traditions."

For example, Speaker of the House John Boehner is a CINO,
because other than being well-dressed, and wearing an American flag pin on his
lapel, he is a closet liberal. Being well-dressed and flaunting a flag pin are
traditions, not principles.

By half right I mean that Boehner, for example, will make a
trenchant observation with which one can agree, but then, either explicitly or
implicitly, his observation will be grounded on a religious norm or premise, or
on tradition, or custom, or just an established and wholly secondary, often
arbitrary “social rule,” and not on any rational criterion. In short, on a
non-fundamental. Boehner said,
about the bill sent to the Senate that would delay implementation of Obamacare
for one year:

"It's time for the Senate to listen to the American
people just like the House has listened to the American people and to pass a one-year
delay of ObamaCare and a permanent repeal of the medical device tax.”

How about permanent repeal of Obamacare? Oh, no. That would
entail establishing and invoking a principle. Boehner, who looks like a former
movie action hero going to seed, would never stoop to acting on principle. Not
that he would recognize one.

Let us turn now to Diana West, who does recognize a principle,
and acts on it.

She opens The Death of
the Grown-Up, Chapter One, “The Rise of the Teen,” with:

“Once, there was a world without teenagers. Literally.
‘Teenager,’ the word itself, doesn’t pop into the lexicon much before 1941.
This speaks volumes about the last few millennia. In all those many centuries,
nobody thought to mention ‘teenagers’ because there was nothing…to think of
mentioning.”

Historically, the first recorded use of the term teen in reference to a person’s age,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in 1673 (in a
Restoration comedy by William Wycherley), and in all cited instances thereafter
of its usage up until 1941, it denoted a person who was about to enter
adulthood and who did not wish to remain a “teen.”

“In considering what I like to call ‘the death of the
grown-up,’ it’s important to keep a fix on this fact: that for all but this
most recent episode of human history, there were children and there were
adults. Children in their teen years aspired to adulthood; significantly, they
didn’t aspire to adolescence. Certainly, adults didn’t aspire to remain
teenagers.

“That doesn’t mean that youth hasn’t always been a source of
adult interest: Just think in five hundred years what Shakespeare, Dickens, the
Brontës, Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, and Leonard Bernstein have done with
teen material. But something has changed. Actually, a lot of things have
changed. For one thing, turning thirteen, instead of bringing children closer
to an adult world, now launches them into a teen universe. For another, due to
the permanent hold our culture has placed on the maturation process, that’s
where they’re likely to find most adults.”

West’s central thesis is that our culture has ossified into a
“perpetual adolescence,” even though the Baby Boomer generation is nearing or
at the age of retirement. That generation was sired and raised by the “greatest
generation,” one of adults and even adolescents who fought World War Two in
combat overseas and in the factories at home.

The “greatest generation,” however, in turn raised a
not-so-great generation many of whose members became the creators and
proponents of or adherents to the rebellious “counterculture” of the 1960’s and
1970’s, with its pronounced leftist, collectivist and nihilist means and ends.
If members of that generation did not actively take part in the assault on the
status quo, then they passively accepted a besieged status quo as mere
powerless spectators.

But the status quo was not so “static.” The government’s role
in the economy and in everyone’s personal lives – through regulation, taxation,
progressive education, a costly, irrational foreign policy, and even in the
arts – grew and expanded and more or less co-opted the morally and
intellectually disarmed, non-rebellious, productive members of that
generation.

Throughout her book West cites numerous instances of adults
abdicating or never discovering their responsibilities as thinking, reasoning
adults. She defines two species of this state of purported adult “adolescence,”
a condition she also claims is exacerbated by multiculturalism and diversity:

A reluctance to assert or champion “adult” values one knows
are superior, or a fear to assert them, lest one be accused of something
terrible (fascism, elitism, or racism) by the enemies of those values.

An indoctrinated ignorance of or hostility to any values that
are demonstrably superior.

She devotes Chapter Two, “The Twist,” to describing the changes
in popular music and dance from Swing to “rock ‘n roll,” cites Elvis Presley as
the progenitor of rap and worse, and does a credible job of tracing the
devolution of music from tonality and melody to rap and bass-based noise. In
Chapter Three, “Clash,” she analyzes the antiwar movement of the 1960’s and
1970’s in terms of it being simply an anarcho-Marxist revolt for the sake of
revolting against parental and establishment authority.

She quotes radical-activists-cum-neo-conservatives and
describes how most university presidents and administrators simply caved into
the demands of student demonstrators, surrendering their authority by
sanctioning their behavior with silence or verbal agreement and often by
granting them amnesty.

“Central to the surrender of the adult, then, was the collapse
of the parent. As much as any political, demographic, or economic factors, this
made the ascendancy of youth possible, and possibly inevitable, first on
campus, and, later, in the wider culture. So much for the World War II-winning
Greatest Generation, whose own offspring, spoiled ‘youths’ in the 1950s, became
everyone’s spoiled youth movement in the 1960s. Life may have been tough for
the men and women whose formative years were marred by Depression and war, but
theirs was the spawn of Dr. Spock’s ‘permissive society.’”

In Chapter Five, “Sophisticated Babies,” West notes the rise
of pornography and the exposure of teens and pre-teens to it. She prepares the
reader for that phenomenon with the revelation that Morris Ernst, “a foe of
censorship who had mounted a winning defense of [James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness
and expletive-laden novel] Ulysses in 1933,” publicly recanted in 1970
in The New York Times, saying that, after seeing how “licentious” the culture
had become, he would “not choose to live in a society without limits to
freedom.” West then comments,

“The arguments that destroyed the legal and moral bases for
censorship of obscenity and pornography apply to trash as well as to art. By
the time the courts, in effect, declared obscenity was dead, they had killed
something vital to a healthy society: the faculty of judgment that attempts to
distinguish between what is obscene and what is not obscene—the avowedly
‘grown-up’ sensibility of an outmoded authority figure who had long relied on a
proven hierarchy of taste and knowledge until it was quite suddenly
leveled.”

In Chapters Four and Six, “Parents Who Need Parents” and
“Boundaries,” West describes parents and adults who either succumb to,
tolerate, or encourage the whims of their children. Often, she notes, parents
indulge in irrational “juvenile” behavior themselves. Among her instances are
the parents who hired a stripper to entertain their son’s high school football
team, the male members of a branch of Rotary International who posed nude for a
fund-raising calendar, and the mother who, in opposition to her concerned
husband, came to the defense of her alcoholic, promiscuous nanny.

In Chapter Seven, “Identity,” West tackles the perilous and
destructive consequences of multiculturalism, cultural relativism, and
diversity in education and in the news media. This is where she shines best,
ascribing to adults the surrender of reality to political correctness and the
suspension of reason and their cognitive faculties in deference to pragmatic
policies of accommodation. On the multicultural indoctrination (it cannot be
called “education”) so pervasive in especially public schools, from kindergarten
on up to the university level, she notes that:

“It teaches children to sublimate the traditions and teachings
of their own civilization – those that tend to regard buffalo-tongue brushes,
for example, as being revolting or unsanitary. The repetition of this kind of
instruction – who are we to say anything about anything? – impress upon young
minds the crucial need to adopt an attitude of painstaking neutrality when
regarding other (read: less developed) cultures. In other words, it teaches
children to suspend their judgment.”

Later, West observes that:

“’That’s their culture’ becomes the mantra of accepting the
Other [West’s reference to Islam, or any primitive, non-Western culture]. But
it also becomes the mantra of denying the Self. And in learning to turn off the
assessment process, in learning to stymie the gut reaction, we have learned to shut
it down entirely….But what happens in the face of less benign cultural
phenomena, from censorship and religious repression to female genital
mutilation, forced marriage, so-called honor killing, and suicide bombings?”

Adults, no less than children, but especially adults who were
subjected to progressive education, and not the full-scale indoctrination that
their children must endure today, are also susceptible to the same
indoctrination and “educated” repression, and very few of them attempt to
“unlearn” the habit of sabotaging their own minds.

Moving from the classroom to the newsroom, West details how
newspapers and wire services, manned largely by progressively educated adults, invest
considerable energy to evade the fact that Islamic terrorists are not just
“gunmen,” “militants,” “perpetrators,” or “activists,” but killers for a
totalitarian cause who have declared war on civilization. Since modern editors
and journalists have been taught, or have uncritically absorbed the policy,
that Islam is not to be judged or condemned – it is, after all, a “religion of
peace,” its horrible record of conquest, enslavement, and brutality to the
contrary notwithstanding – the prohibition must be extended to anyone who acts
in its name.

“…[T]he media’s studied nonjudgmentalism…gives jihadist
terrorists a perpetual benefit of the doubt. Such doubts – raised in the
language of ‘neutrality’ – reserve a crucial moral space for the possibility of
sympathetic judgment, enforcing the notion that blamelessness for terrorism is
just as possible as blame….Besides staving off condemnation and leaving room
for approval, the act of suspending judgment – and this is what may be most
significant – delivers terrorism and terrorists from the nether realm that all
civilizations reserve for taboo, anathema, and abomination.” ­­

Treating multiculturalism, diversity, and environmentalism as
religions – since any one of these is now accepted on faith without thought as
unassailable and as unquestionable as Islam is to Muslims and the Bible is to
Christians – it would be apropos to quote a prominent atheist, A. C. Grayling, about
the means and ends of any religion: “It is the business of all religious
doctrine to keep their votaries in a scare of intellectual infancy.”* Infants,
pre-teens, and most teens have not developed their cognitive powers nor
accumulated a fund of knowledge that would together enable them to make
rational judgments and to act on them. We now have an educational establishment
wholly devoted to sabotaging children's minds to ensure that they cannot make
rational judgments.

In Chapter Eight, “The Real Culture War,” West writes
fervently and convincingly about the steady encroachment of Islam in the West
as a mortal threat to freedom and free speech. But, it should be noted the
equally perilous resurgence of Christianity in America that threatens those
same values, especially when discussing the censorial fatwahs of Islamic
ideology and how they are being insinuated into Western culture. The Church's
history in regards to censorship is nothing to boast of. Had West been a
contemporary of Hypatia
in 5th century Alexandria, she would have shared that thinker's fate at the hands of Christian clerics.
(At the moment, West
is being attacked by so-called allies for having questioned the received history
of World War II and Soviet espionage in her book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character.)

I wish West had devoted more discussion to the subject of how
the welfare state contributes to the “death of the grown-up.” While the welfare
state was originally intended to “help the poor,” it has metastasized into a
monster from which even the wealthy insist on collecting the services and
taxable pittance paid by Medicare and Social Security. It has suborned
businessmen, parents, students, farmers and even writers and artists, sending
them on hide-and-seek numbers games through the labyrinth of the tax code. The
welfare state has compromised and made dependent anyone who claims an “entitlement”
to be taken care of as protection against the cost of sustaining a “great” or
“kinder, gentler” or “just” society, an entitlement which one either claims, or
is claimed for one by others, as a reward for one’s “contribution” to society.

West inveighs against the multiculturalist agenda in
education, and acknowledges the debilitating effects of what makes that agenda
possible, the progressive educational philosophy, almost universally in place
since at least World War One. The closest West comes to a philosophical
explanation or cause is in Chapter Seven, “Identity.”

“Maybe it was French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss who first
sounded the call to arms to ‘fight against cultural differences hierarchically’
in the 1950s; by the 1980s, with a resounding multiculturalist victory in the
so-called culture wars, this leveling mission was accomplished.”

Actually, that “call to arms” was sounded before
Levi-Strauss’s brand of “textual analysis” and “deconstruction” became the ubiquitous
and destructive methods of American literary studies. It began with the “New
Criticism” that infested America and Europe after World War Two and with the
“beat generation’s” literature of plotless novels and formless, often
drug-induced prose. Ultimately, Levi-Strauss, his exponents, and his
practitioners were the heirs of the 18th century Prussian
philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who professed that we can't know anything, so anything
goes.

West missed a chance to tie her thesis of “adolescence worship”
to the influence of J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye,
a novel about teenage angst in confronting modern society and how Holden
Caulfield, the anti-hero, was reluctant to take his place in a culture marked,
claims Salinger, by phoniness, conformity and corruption. The novel has been
required reading in American literature courses for decades and helped to
prepare the Baby Boomer generation and its offspring for what later has become
multiculturalism and anti-Americanism.

Two other “anti-establishment,” youth-young-adult angst
novels, Charles Webb’s The Graduate (1963, faithfully produced by
Hollywood in 1967), and Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus (1959, also
faithfully transferred to the big screen in 1969), could have also been drafted
by West to buttress her thesis, as well. They could have served as concrete
instances that would illustrate her principal thesis. She might have easily
contrasted these novels with one she holds up as an ideal story of a teenager
who looks forward to being an adult, Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen
(1916).

West ends Chapter Nine, “Men, Women…or Children?” with:

“Eternal youth is proving fatal; it is time to find our
rebirth in adulthood.”

Overall, West’s thesis underscores the dangerous cracks, leaks
and rot that characterize modern culture. But it is not enough to recommend
anything more profound than for Americans to reclaim the role of thoughtful and
responsible adulthood.

What accounts for America’s “arrested development” has been
and continues to be the absence of a philosophy of reason as the dominant
cultural attribute. We now have a country populated by physically mature adults
too many of whom have “regressed” over the course of more than a generation to
a state of helpless ignorance and the self-induced, institutionalized
childishness of pretending that things are not what they are.

But, is “adolescent” the proper term to describe a culture
that expresses and patronizes the irrational, the emotional, the whim, and the
“pubescent”? Is “regression” a valid diagnosis of the condition of much of
today’s adult population? It is possible that West’s “adolescence” is her
substitute concept for “pre-maturity,” and not merely physical maturity, but
mental maturity.

There was a time when reason was the dominant (though not
exclusive) mover of men. And it is the gradual “death,” disparagement, or
abandonment of reason in most fields or realms of values and action today that
can account for any ostensive “juvenile” character of the culture. It is not so
much an abdication of maturity or adulthood as it is a collapse into an
eclectically-filled vacuum when reason is siphoned from men’s minds, regardless
of their age.

The Death of the
Grown-Up is an invaluable introduction to and diagnosis of the debilitating
anti-value and anti-reason cultural illness that is suffocating the country.

*A.C. Grayling, “Can an atheist be a
fundamentalist atheist?” in The
Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, edited by Christopher
Hitchens (Philadelphia: De Capo/Perseus Press, 2007), p. 474.

The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s
Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization, by Diana West. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
256 pp.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Daniel
Greenfield, the Sultan Knish columnist and frequent contributor to FrontPage's
The Point Blog, is one of the most perceptive, objective, prolific, and ruthless
observers of contemporary politics and culture in the country. He writes things
Charles Krauthammer would be hesitant to publish, and says things no one on Fox
News would dare utter.

This
is because he is an intellectual, a thinker in fundamentals, and so he has a
far wider perspective on things Islamic than has any newspaper pundit or TV
anchor or teleprompter reader.

One
of the first tasks I perform when returning to my computer after a night's
sleep is to hunt up and read his latest pieces. I do not know how he keeps up
the pace and the output. I've often kidded him by asking him if he has a time
warp device that allows him to vanish into a timeless realm to cover and
produce as much copy as he does, and then emerge from it to have a bite to eat
and take a nap. That way he could keep to the twenty-four hour day with the
rest of us.

He
will only admit that it is "like racing along a treadmill manned by
Marxist clowns."

More
often than not his Sultan Knish columns are evocative of H.L. Mencken at his
best: wryly ironic, sometimes bitter, always contemptuous of politicians and
activists who suffer from foot-in-mouth disease or who have been lobotomized by
political correctness, or who are just plain morally and/or politically corrupt.
Regardless of his mood, he will make an unforgettable point. A few times he
might over-write, and occasionally a grammatical error might creep in, but such
lapses are so infrequent it would be picayune to dwell on them. Given the
caliber of his intellect and his bare-knuckles honesty, readers are getting a
bargain.

Greenfield
has a devoted and growing readership. He has been writing "Sultan
Knish" since 2005 and for FrontPage since 2011. His FrontPage byline
reads: "… a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center… a New York
writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international
challenges America faces in the 21st century."

An
example of his thinking is his latest Sultan Knish column, "The
Gang Religion of Islam," written on the occasion of the attack on the Westgate
Mall in Nairobi,
Kenya over the weekend. While the attack and massacre of non-Muslims (and
perhaps of a few Muslims who weren't lucky enough to be asked to recite an
Islamic prayer or name Mohammad's mother) has been claimed by Al-Shabab, a
faction of the Somalian jihadist gang of the same name, Greenfield points out
that the particular umbrella name of the killers hardly matters. The attack
could've been planned and executed by any other jihadist outfit: Hamas, Hezbollah,
Al-Nur,
Al-Qa'ida Central, the Muslim Brotherhood, or any one of numerous units of the
"Free Syrian Army."

In
short, Greenfield did not use the notion of "gangs" as a mere
metaphor. He identified Islam's core modus
operandi: kill for the sake of killing.

To
one reader of "Gang Religion," who commented on Islam's "Golden
Age," Greenfield replied:

Islam is not conducive to philosophy. You can't read
it and gain a larger sense of the world. There's no room for speculation
afterward. It's a series of badly cribbed scriptures and the narrative of
Islam's present, past and future wars.

In
short, Immanuel Kant had a philosophy (with which Islam and modern Western
culture are largely copasetic). Hegel had a philosophy (which let loose today's
Marxists and Progressives and other totalitarians). Martin Heidegger had a
philosophy (which sanctioned Nazism). Christianity and Judaism have their
philosophies.

Islam
has no philosophy that pursues the meaning of life. In it, speculation is
prohibited. As such, it can only obsess with the meaning of death, without
page-long Kantian paragraphs that explicate its death-worship.

Islam
at bottom is imbecilic and it attracts recidivist imbeciles. Passive Muslims
are those who religiously go to mosque and question nothing. Activist Muslims
are the killer imbeciles who fly planes into skyscrapers, prey on non-Muslim
women in Britain and Europe, and invade shopping malls, guns blazing.

Islam's
"Golden Age" is based on Greek and Roman texts which invading Arabs
might have discovered and preserved, but which they did not originate and which
were subsequently disdained as un-Islamic.

But
Islam, if it can be called a philosophy, is a philosophy of nihilism and death.
Islam, as Greenfield describes it (and too few others critical of Islam), is a
manual for conquest, submission and self-immolation cobbled together from other
creeds, chiefly from Judaism and Christianity, while Allah was originally a
pagan moon god. There is no system or structure to it. It is an arbitrary,
unwholesome porridge of assertions, sayings, anecdotes, and dicta, a disparate
potpourri of statements of dubious authorship whose central theme is "conquer
them, convert them, or kill them." It appeals to psychopaths and
sociopaths – the jihadists – and to the morally rootless and selfless rank-and-file
Muslims, that "silent majority" of manqués who refuse to think. But
its overall thesis is explained by Greenfield in his opening paragraph:

Killing non-Muslims is the point of Islam. To the
extent that it has any point. That isn't to say that Islam doesn't preach the
virtues of charity and love for one's fellow Muslim. It does. But its virtues
are not original. Like most of the rest of the framework of it, they are lifted
from existing religions.

Not
a day passes anymore without news of another spate of Muslim honor killings,
rapes of child brides, or of mass murders of Muslims by Muslims of either sect,
or of the targeting of Westerners and others not of the Islamic suasion for
slaughter or rape. All of it done in the name of Allah, or for the sake of
being a "good Muslim." Since 9/11, nearly 20,000 acts of Islamic
terror have been committed. Perhaps more. Someone is
keeping count.

But
Greenfield asks the question: If these crimes were instead committed by men for
no ostensive or alleged religious reason, would we not deem them crimes,
regardless of the upbringing or religious background of the perpetrators?
Charles Manson, Richard Speck, Aaron Alexis and other mass murderers committed
their crimes without benefit of religion or ideology. They were psychotics,
sociopaths, or simply nihilistic. Still, we hold them responsible for their
crimes. What difference to the victims should it make that they have been
slaughtered in the name of a deity? What difference should it make to us that
they were slaughtered for a religious reason, or in the name of a deluded
vision or for no comprehensible reason at all?

Greenfield
leads into his thesis:

Islam may have become a religion, but it began as a
code. Like the Pirate Code or the Thieves Law of Russia, it was a set of rules
that allowed a select group of bandits to choose leaders, plan attacks and
divide the loot.

The code invested their actions with meaning, it kept order in their ranks and
allowed the members to believe that dying for the gang was more than a martial
ethos, but also contained a spiritual element. Similar attempts to invest gang
life with spirituality can be found in the tattoos, rap songs and graffiti
memorials of every street gang in America.

And
what are street gangs notorious for? Violence. Killing. Terrorism. With guns,
with tire irons, baseball bats, knives, or anything else that is proven to be
lethal.

Imagine the Kingism of the Latin Kings street gang,
which has its own prayers, crude theology and philosophy becoming the religion
of the gangs ruling over a Post-American civilization. In the 80s, the Chicago
gang Blackstone Rangers realized the benefits of becoming a religion and
declared itself the El Rukn tribe of the Moorish Science Temple of America.

Despite the elaborate mythology, the Latin Kings is a gang first and a religion
second. In time it might become a full religion, stranger things have happened,
but it will never be able to escape its origins. It will at its heart always be
a gang code with an emphasis on providing a spiritual overlay for gang
violence.

And that is the case with Islam.

It's
nothing new. Let's go back to the early 20th century, and the
Chicago of that era, and to the St.
Valentine's Day Massacre of February 14th, 1929. In a reprise of
the event, John O'Brien of the Chicago Tribune wrote:

On this frigid morning, in an unheated brick garage at
2122 N. Clark St., seven men were lined up against a whitewashed wall and
pumped with 90 bullets from submachine guns, shotguns and a revolver. It was
the most infamous of all gangland slayings in America, and it savagely achieved
its purpose--the elimination of the last challenge to Al Capone for the mantle
of crime boss in Chicago.

What
was the prize? The undisputed monopoly of distributing prohibited liquor to the
city and its surroundings.

The victims, killed outright or left dying in the
garage, included Frank "Hock" Gusenberg, [George "Bugs"] Moran's
enforcer, and his brother, Peter "Goosy" Gusenberg. Four of the other
victims were Moran gangsters, but the seventh dead man was Dr. Reinhardt
Schwimmer, an optician who cavorted with criminals for thrills. Missing that morning
was Capone's prize, Moran, who slept in.

Interestingly,
gangs have attracted hangers-on who are fascinated by the power gangs enjoyed
with near impunity. Another hanger-on who cavorted with gangsters was Saul
Alinsky, whose mentor, Al Capone's gang "manager" Frank Nitti,
helped him to formulate his "rules for radicals"
and "community organizing" techniques.

Is
there really any difference between the mob wars of the 1920's and 1930's, and
the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites? Except for the religious
coloring, both sects seek uncontested dominance over the other, preferably by
extinction of the other.

Need
one say more about "gangster government"? In attacking the Obama
seizure of the auto industry, Michelle Bachmann must have done her homework on
the origins of President Barack Obama's policies, as well. She called the whole
phenomenon "gangster
government."

What
is the attraction of Islam to psychopaths, sociopaths, and nihilists? As
Greenfield explains:

After over a thousand years, after its own empires and
conquests stretching around the world, after endless religious schools, reform
movements, theological debates and splinter groups, Islam is not able to leave
its gang roots behind. It is still at its core a gang religion. That is why it
appeals so well to convicts who recognize that they are interacting with
something far more ancient than Kingism.

That is also why Islam, like most street gangs, degenerates so readily into
internecine violence. No matter how much its devotees dream of conquering the
decadent West and planting the black flag of Islam everywhere, they can't help
turning their guns on each other, because gangs are naturally primed to fight
amongst themselves. The gang code never suffices to settle disputes among men
who live by violence. They may fight to impose Islamic law on the world, but
they can't live by it.

What
are we witnessing in Syria, in Libya, in Egypt, in Kenya, in Nigeria? Only the
Capone and Moran gangs tricked out in ghutras or shemaghs or keffiyah masks and
wearing suicide vests or carrying AK47's and grenades.Just as Capone's and Nitti's Chicago Outfit
couldn't keep the truce with other gangs, so the Sunnis and Shi'ites and other
Islamic sects can't unite permanently, only temporarily, when they gang up on
non-gang members. Non-Muslims.

Syria is Islam at its most primal with gangs fighting
over the ruins of cities, small groups joining up, Shiite and Sunni militias
killing each other, Free Syrian Army and Al Nusra Front gangs fighting over
bakeries and pipelines, an endless stream of recruits from around the world
rushing to join up in a gang war that has claimed over 100,000 lives.

Not
even America's bootleg and drug gangs and modern organized crime families can
top that figure. And that figure is only the tip of a mountain of corpses that
began growing in the 7th century.

And the question was how do you keep a band of bandits
from stabbing each other over the loot while convincing them that if they die
while stealing a goat or raping someone's third wife, they'll go to a magical
place full of goats and virginal third wives with skin of the color of bone
marrow.

As the holy warriors of the Syrian Civil War killing each other over control of
bakeries while fighting to impose the perfection of Islamic Law on everyone can
tell you, it's not a very good answer even to that question. It's an even worse
answer to any larger social problem that doesn't involve twenty men trying to
divide the profits from one raid on an abandoned university.

But when a religion is based on gang violence and because of that inevitably
reverts to gang violence, it's an answer that keeps coming up again and again.

The answer of Islam is the answer of violence. It's
the answer of uniting the various gangs around killing non-Muslims. Sometimes
that answer even works.

Few
Muslims can deal with the conundrum. Raheel Raza, for example, in his September
25th Gatestone column, "The Danger in
Our Midst," addresses it. His article is fundamentally an overture to
repudiation. Writing about the recent violence in Nairobi, he asks:

Is it because there are verses in the Qu'ran that can
be, and have been, used to justify violence against non-Muslims? If this is the
situation, then it is time for us to lift our heads out of the sand, and
understand that the enemy is within.

Islam
is a prisoner of its own rationalistic Möbius strip. It can't escape its
nature, writes Greenfield. It is congenitally doomed by its defective,
anti-life purposes and ends. It can't be "reformed" without
repudiating its core premises and therefore obviating it. Its metaphysics is
impossible and the stuff of Looney
Tunes, and its epistemology is intrinsically blood-red.

The
"ideal" Islam, writes Greenfield, isn't Muslims butchering each other
in Syria.

Islam finds its meaning from fighting and killing
non-Muslims. It is the only meaning that it can ever have. The exercises of its
devotees who memorize countless Koranic verses, who debate the fine points of
laws and prepare for their pilgrimages to Mecca must inevitably converge on the
violent core that gives the whole thing purpose.

The historical dynamic of Islam has never left behind its gang origins. Its
future is measured in terms of conquest and more conquest. The manifest destiny
of Islam is an eating contest as its holy warriors cram more and more territories
and people into an expanding Caliphate that falls apart vomiting up the
conquests into chaos. The lessons are never learned. The holy warriors fall to
fighting each other.

That
congenital condition can be likened to the steel pin ball that will always roll
towards the bottom, no matter how furiously the Islamic scholars work the
flippers. No matter how many times they send the ball back up to score on one
of the buttons, the ball's ultimate and only destination is the black hole of
nihilism.

The
lessons can't be learned, because Muslims have a vested interest in the
impossible metaphysics and feel naked without flaunting their blood-soaked
epistemology in reams and sound-bytes of taqiyya
and practiced dissimulation. Greenfield writes:

Every fourth gang hip-hop song is about how hard it is
to leave the gang life. The other three are about how everyone else out there
is a pretender and not a real gangsta. That is Islam in a nutshell. Islamic
civilization can't leave the gang life and insists that every other
civilization and even most other Muslims are pretenders and that only the
Salafiest of the Salafists are the real Gangstas.

No
one, not even the most authoritative, articulate, and well-read
"Islamophobes" in the blog realm can inveigh against Islam as
Greenfield can and does consistently and with haunting prose. He goes to the
core issue of Islam and reveals its fetid, dank nature. He finds no redemption
in its diseased leprosy. It's unfortunate that his work is confined to the blog
realm, because more people concerned with Islam would profit by imbibing it.

He
knows there are no such things as "moderate" Islamists or
"radical" Islamists or even "militant" Islamists. The adjectival
terms are merely evasions indulged in by men who have their own mental problems.
In Islam, there are only the passive dullards, and the disconnected
"activists." He knows that jihadists are simply being consistent with
their gangster code, adhering to the whole panoply of Koranic ideology in
pretend exercises in "spirituality." Being consistent means killing,
either the heretical other, or the "People of the Book." That is the
nature of any terrorist organization or creed.

And
that is Islam. Even run-of-the-mill criminals need a philosophy of life, even
if it is unarticulated or founded on paranoia or schizophrenia or on some
Rosicrucian-like delusion.

Islam,
however, articulates a philosophy of death.

If
you want a powerful guide to the unabridged, naked hell that is Islam, Daniel Greenfield
is your Dante.

Friday, September 20, 2013

When
I was about ten years old (in the 1950's), my foster father and I drove out to
run some errands. On the way, we were stopped by a black traffic cop who was
directing traffic at an intersection. I had never seen a black man before, so I
was not a little stunned and curious. All I saw was a black man in a blue uniform blowing his
whistle. My foster father, however, stunned me even more. He muttered,
"Damn niggers are taking over the world!"

I
gave him a shocked look that must have looked to him like a reproach, because
when we got back home, he took his belt to me.

On
another occasion, when I was about the same age, the family had
"company" over for dinner. Someone asked me – because the subject
must have been race, but I don’t recall the particular details – it must have
been one of my foster folks, "What color are we, Ed?" I answered,
"Beige."

Wrong
answer. It earned me another session with the strap after the company left.

But
this column isn't about race or color-blindness. It's about the new egalitarian
push to grant ugly or homely people – race optional – their "fair share"
of entitlements and a generous dollop of "social justice." It's about
the educational
and cultural establishment taking their belts to human esthetics and all
measurements of value. And by "belt," I mean government force.

The
issue of ugly people has been gathering steam since at least 2011. Stanford
Junior University law professor Deborah L. Rhode, in her
2010 book, The
Beauty Bias, began thumping the war drums about the "injustice of
appearance in life and law." I quote from the synopsis of her book, in
which Rhode or her publisher's copywriter noted, after claiming that the annual
global investment in appearance is in the neighborhood of $200 billion:

Many individuals experience stigma, discrimination,
and related difficulties, such as eating disorders, depression, and risky
dieting and cosmetic procedures. Women bear a vastly disproportionate share of
those costs, in part because they face standards more exacting than those for
men, and pay greater penalties for falling short.

That
was Rhode's liberal/left call-to-arms. Next, she gets to the totalitarian nub
of her opus:

The Beauty
Bias explores the social, biological,
market, and media forces that have contributed to appearance-related problems,
as well as feminism's difficulties in confronting them…. Appearance-related
bias infringes fundamental rights, compromises merit principles, reinforces
debilitating stereotypes, and compounds the disadvantages of race, class, and
gender….The Beauty Bias provides the
first systematic survey of how [existing] appearance laws work in practice, and
a compelling argument for extending their reach….

Rhode's
book was published by the Oxford University Press in May 2010. It was favorably
received by Publishers Weekly, the Christian Science Monitor, Slate.com, and a
passel of notorious distaff gender studies entities. I was surprised not to see
the Huffington Post and other liberal/left blog sites endorse the book. In the
reviews, she is cited as "the nation's most cited scholar on professional
responsibility."

Responsibility
to whom? Or to what? You fill in the blanks. If individuals aren't permitted to
establish their own esthetic values – even if they enter an employer's
calculations of what he finds suitable for employment, or for a wife, or for a
work of art, then who or what will establish them for him?

In
April 2013, Daniel Hamermesh's book, Beauty
Pays, appeared from Princeton University Press to the acclaim of
Publishers Weekly, the New Yorker, the New York Journal of Books, Forbes, the
Daily Mail, and an audience of obedient critics responding to
liberal/collectivist autosuggestion. Hamermesh is a
professor of economics at the University of Texas-Austin and a research
associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His work has been
subsidized by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, and he
has written on the economic aspects of "beauty, sleep and suicide."

He
missed one major realm of research: the economic impact of picking lint from one's
belly button.

From
his book synopsis:

Most of us know there is a payoff to looking good, and
in the quest for beauty we spend countless hours and billions of dollars on
personal grooming, cosmetics, and plastic surgery….

Including
former Speaker of the House Nancy "Let's see what's in it" Pelosi, a
soul-mate of Hamermesh, who has spent a fortune on plastic surgery and/or Botox
injections to present to the American public a mask of motherly and despotic benevolence.

The first book to seriously measure the advantages of
beauty, Beauty Pays demonstrates how
society favors the beautiful and how better-looking people experience startling
but undeniable benefits in all aspects of life….

What
happened to Rhode's book? Wasn't it
the first one to seriously measure the advantages of beauty? But, we quibble.
In a Huffington Post interview
of September 2nd, 2011, Hamermesh reveals his premises.

To me the crucial question is whether we should think
of beauty as productive, or as reflecting discrimination. This is a very tough
question, since there's no doubt that hiring a beautiful person raises a
company's sales. I would argue that beauty's effects reflect societal
discrimination, and that is not inherently productive.

It
isn't often that one sees a glaring contradiction in the space of one short
paragraph. On one hand, Hamermesh says, a "beautiful person"
undoubtedly raises a company's sales. On the other hand, because of
"societal discrimination," raising a company's sales isn't
productive. Go figure.

He
was asked to define beautiful and ugly persons.

I wouldn't and can't. It's like pornography – I know
it when I see it.

No,
Hamermesh wouldn’t dream of revealing his personal measure of beauty and
ugliness. These, measures, he contends, are a consequence of a societal
consensus.

In
his August 27thNew
York Times op-ed, "Ugly? You May Have a Case," Hamermesh reveals
his true agenda, which is to correct society's "consensus" with fiat
law.

A more radical solution may be needed: why not offer
legal protections to the ugly, as we do with racial, ethnic and religious
minorities, women and handicapped individuals?

We actually already do offer such protections in a few
places, including in some jurisdictions in California, and in the District of
Columbia, where discriminatory treatment based on looks in hiring, promotions,
housing and other areas is prohibited. Ugliness could be protected generally in
the United States by small extensions of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Ugly people could be allowed to seek help from the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission and other agencies in overcoming the effects of discrimination. We
could even have affirmative-action programs for the ugly.

Hamermesh
looks like a jolly
old fellow with a beard who wouldn't hurt a fly. He might have even
chuckled at a relevant "Seinfeld" scene. But
he didn't write his op-ed tongue-in-cheek or as a suggestion for a Saturday
Night Live skit. He is serious. He is proposing that the government employ
force to "aid" the ugly.

For purposes of administering a law, we surely could
agree on who is truly ugly, perhaps the worst-looking 1 or 2 percent of the
population. The difficulties in classification are little greater than those
faced in deciding who qualifies for protection on grounds of disabilities that
limit the activities of daily life, as shown by conflicting decisions in
numerous legal cases involving obesity….

Economic arguments for protecting the ugly are as
strong as those for protecting some groups currently covered by legislation. So
why not go ahead and expand protection to the looks-challenged?….

You might reasonably disagree and argue for protecting
all deserving groups. Either way, you shouldn’t be surprised to see the United
States heading toward this new legal frontier.

No,
we shouldn't be surprised, especially when entities like Stanford law professor
Deborah Rhode are all for anti-discrimination laws that would protect
("promote"?) the ugly and penalize the beautiful, and when there are
countless individuals who would readily and shamelessly claim that they were
discriminated against because of their looks. And who might be the
"we" who would "agree" on who is ugly? An "Ugliness
Panel" convened under the aegis of an ObamaLooks law? Perhaps the panel
would recommend that people be sent to hospitals to have their looks corrected,
to give them a better chance at jobs and life in general.

Rod
Serling's Twilight Zone episode, "The
Eye of the Beholder," is a classic tale of what our government wardens
would have in mind.

Ruth
Graham, in her August 23rd Boston Globe column, "Who
will fight the beauty bias?", natters on about the beauty-vs.-ugly
issue without committing herself to any legal or "social" remedies.

The galloping injustice of "lookism" has not
escaped psychologists, economists, sociologists, and legal scholars. Stanford
law professor Deborah L. Rhode's book, The
Beauty Bias, lamented "the injustice of appearance in life and
law," while University of Texas, Austin economist Daniel Hamermesh's 2011 Beauty Pays…traced the concrete benefits
of attractiveness, including a $230,000 lifetime earnings advantage over the
unattractive.

So,
now we will add "lookism" to the list of ism's and phobias that have
sanctioned curative legislation: ageism, heightism, sexism, homophobia, deafism,
mutism, Islamophobia, racism, weightism. Have I left anything out? Oh, yes.
Speech-impedimentism.

In
all the articles I have read while researching this column, I did not encounter
a single definition of beauty or ugly regarding the human visage. The writers
wrote from their own vague, woozy notions of what those terms mean, yet they
are willing to legislate politically correct esthetics based on their
approximations of what the terms mean.

Beauty is a sense of harmony. Whether it’s an image, a
human face, a body, or a sunset, take the object which you call beautiful, as a
unit [and ask yourself]: what parts is it made up of, what are its constituent
elements, and are they all harmonious? If they are, the result is beautiful. If
there are contradictions and clashes, the result is marred or positively ugly.

For instance, the simplest example would be a human
face. You know what features belong in a human face. Well, if the face is
lopsided, [with a] very indefinite jaw-line, very small eyes, beautiful mouth,
and a long nose, you would have to say that’s not a beautiful face. But
if all these features are harmoniously integrated, if they all fit your view of
the importance of all these features on a human face, then that face is
beautiful.

Now since this is an objective definition of
beauty, there of course can be universal standards of beauty—provided you
define the terms of what objects you are going to classify as beautiful and
what you take as the ideal harmonious relationship of the elements of that
particular object. To say, “It’s in the eyes of the beholder”—that, of course,
would be pure subjectivism, if taken literally. It isn’t [a matter of] what
you, for unknown reasons, decide to regard as beautiful. It is true, of course,
that if there were no valuers, then nothing could be valued as beautiful or
ugly, because values are created by the observing consciousness—but they are
created by a standard based on reality. So here the issue is: values, including
beauty, have to be judged as objective, not subjective or intrinsic.

The
attack on beauty is an attack on values – on values for being values. It is an assault
on the good for being the good. The nihilistic nature of this renewed attack is
disguised by a profession of relativism. "What's ugly to you is beautiful
to me," is the defensive cop-out response by anyone whose sordid tastes in
art and literature are questioned.

"There
is no lobby for the homely," writes Graham. "How do you change a
discriminatory behavior that, even though unfair, is obviously deep, hard to
pin down, and largely unconscious…?"

Tentatively, experts are beginning to float possible
solutions. Some have proposed legal remedies including designating unattractive
people as a protected class, creating affirmative action programs for the
homely, or compensating disfigured but otherwise healthy people in
personal-injury courts….

Other
solutions would require the systemic and systematic lobotomization of men's
minds so they are "bias-free" or value-free. This is what is
occurring in the nation's schools in esthetics, in history, in politics, in
science, to produce a generation of manqués conditioned to have their minds
programmed to respond to the state's or the race's or collective's values of
servitude and self-sacrifice.

Graham
writes:

How to fix this problem depends on what kind of
problem, exactly, you think it is. A number of scholars see it as fundamentally
a civil-rights issue, with the unattractive a class of people who are provably
and consistently discriminated against. It's an idea that seems poised to
resonate beyond the academy….

Where it resonates the most beyond the academy
is in the envious, malignant souls of those who are itching to elevate the ugly
to the same value level of the beautiful, in order to destroy the beautiful and
all beauty.

Ellsworth
Toohey, the arch villain of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, articulated the
principal method behind the assault on beauty:“Don’t set out to raze all shrines – you'll frighten men. Enshrine
mediocrity – and the shrines are razed.”

It is in the name of the mediocre, the
nondescript, the ugly, and the average that the nihilists
in and out of the academy have declared war on beauty.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

I
can appreciate a good joke. But Russian President Vladimir Putin's
Op-Ed in the New York Times of September 11th, "A Plea for
Caution," which I'm sure caused him to smile as he penned it, is not funny.
It isn't even a bad joke.

On
one hand, there is some humor in seeing President Barack Obama being hoisted on
his own petard for having shot off his mouth about the "red line" he
had drawn about Syrian President Bashar Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons
– that was on August 20th, over a year
ago – and now having to back-pedal.
He owned that red line, and, true to form, is now disowning it, claiming that
it was "the world's," and not just his. That's his "community
organizing" skills coming to the fore. As Robert Farley of FactCheck.org
concluded on September 6th:

Obama is correct to argue that the international
community has long drawn a “red line” condemning the use of chemical weapons,
but his point blurs the fact that his “red line” comment in August 2012 was
made in the context of what it might take for the U.S. to get involved
militarily in Syria. While Obama may have had some justification for drawing
that line based on international conventions, the decision to tie U.S. military
involvement to Assad using chemical weapons was Obama’s red line.

Another
chuckle was earned by Secretary of State John "Swift Boat" Kerry when
he inadvertently gave Putin the idea of suggesting that Assad's chemical
weapons could be put under lock and key for the duration of the Syrian
"civil war." As Bloomberg
News iterated on September 10th:

Putin’s remarks complicate the outlook for the Russian
proposal a day after it was presented by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov, who had seized on comments in London by U.S. Secretary of
State John Kerry about the possibility of Syria turning over its
chemical-weapons stockpile.

But,
if these are jokes, they are not long-lived ones. In past columns we examined
the horrific record Obama has chalked up for himself since taking the
presidential oath of office in 2009. We should now revisit the record of the
man who would assume to take the leadership and moral high ground and have the
chutzpah to offer Americans and their political leaders his advice. While no one
should get too excited about Obama getting a deserved comeuppance, no one
should get too excited about Putin, either. After all, Putin, the man with the arctic-cold
blue killer's eyes, is a man after Obama's own heart.

He
is a successful and feared power-luster.

However,
a joke of sorts was practiced on Putin and his Op-Ed. Someone at the New York
Times had the presence of mind to illustrate his column with a Black Hand,
an Italian Mafia warning to extortion victims. Putin did imply, ever so subtly,
that if the U.S. launched a strike against Syria, it would have to contend with
Russia.

The potential strike by the United States against Syria…will
result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict
far beyond Syria's borders…It could throw the entire system of international law
and order out of balance.

That
is called stealing Obama's thunder.

First
off, Putin had a
career as a KGB officer in charge of watching other Russians and also
foreigners. Posted in Dresden when the Wall went down and Eastern Europe found
itself adrift of Soviet domination, he easily made the transition from being a
KGB officer for the Soviet Union to being a watcher for the Federal Security
Service (FSB), which succeeded the KBG after the collapse of the Soviets in
1991. At Leningrad State University, still in the KGB until the organization
underwent its name change, he watched over the student body and recruited more
spooks.

Later,
he oversaw the transfer of Soviet state properties to the new federal government
of the Russian Federation. In the economic and political chaos following the
collapse of the Soviet government, Russian business and industry were up for
grabs, causing the creation of a state-protected oligarchy.

Putin
has a doctorate in economics. His dissertation title was "The Strategic
Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations,"
in which he argued for the establishment by the state of "National
Champions" in business and industry. Sounds a lot like Obama's plan to
subsidize American "national champions" in "green"
technology, except those "champions" have all gone belly-up, knocked
out cold by the realities of business.

Putin rose to the top
of the new Russian political system, becoming between 1999 and 2000 prime
minister, then president from 2000 to 2008, prime minister again from 2008 to
2012, and president again in 2012. It is quite appropriate that a skilled and
determined ex-KGB officer should rise to the top of political power in Russia
and have a firm and ruthless grip on that power.

The
long and short of how Putin remade Russia is that from being governed by a
totalitarian communist régime, he
transformed it into a nation ruled by an authoritarian fascist régime. The Russian state is in "partnership"
with companies that toe Putin's line, determines the content and policies of
state and private news media, and caters to the wishes of many Russians that
Russia become again a power to contend with on the world stage.

There
are Obama's little wars, and Putin's Northern Caucasus "problem."
Putin waged brutal wars with "autonomous" republics within the
Russian Federation that wanted to secede. The two against Chechnya were simply battles
between one authoritarian régime, Putin's, against an Islamic one.

Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an
armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country.
There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more
than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the
government. The United States State Department has designated Al Nusra Front
and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as
terrorist organizations. This internal conflict, fueled by foreign weapons
supplied to the opposition, is one of the bloodiest in the world.

Putin
was exercising a bit of diplomatic courtesy by not naming who was supplying the
"rebels" with weapons: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United States.

His
forces invaded Georgia,
nominally an independent nation, over its policies in dealing with the
"breakaway" republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Light operas and
satirical plays were once written about the interminable squabbles in the
Balkans. No one is composing librettos about the bitter conflicts between
Russia and what were once the "autonomous" Socialist Republics of the
late Soviet Union. There are no "good guys" in any of these conflicts
whose side one can take.

At
5'7", Putin is a short man, but a combination of a state-controlled Stalinist
personality cult for "public relations" purposes and a strong streak
of personal narcissism show him flying fighter jets, shooting tigers, competing
in martial arts contests, fishing, hunting, swimming, and engaging in other
"manly" activities, many of them bare-chested. The only picture
missing is of Putin wresting with a bear, or dancing with wolves. All together,
Putin's photo-ops are better than Obama's golfing photo-ops. You'll never see a
picture of Putin in a sand-trap.

Which
is what Obama found himself in over his "red line" remarks.

Putin's
Russia is not a place to practice freedom of speech. The number of journalists,
rights activists and other individuals who have been murdered or assassinated for
practicing it is high, and that shouldn’t be startling. Imagine a member of the
Al Capone gang suddenly advocating repeal of the 18th
Amendment to his bosses. He would soon be sleeping with the fishes.

Stanislav Markelov, a civil
rights attorney representing the family of a woman who was murdered in Chechnya
by a Russian tank commander, and protesting
the early release of that man from a ten-year sentence, was shot in killed in
central Moscow, together with Anastasia
Baburova, a 25-year-old journalist trainee as they left a press conference about
the early release. The tank commander, Yuri
Budanov, did not get to enjoy his freedom too long; he was himself assassinated
in Moscow.

Alexander
Litvinenko, a former FSB (or KGB) officer, defected from Russia when he
protested the rampant corruption in the Russian government. He was poisoned in London
in a restaurant where he met someone who claimed to have information about the
murder of a Russian
journalist, Anna
Politkovskaya that same year, 2006. He died of thallium poisoning.

Natalya
Estemirova, a civil rights activist for Chechnya, was kidnapped and shot in
2009, probably at the behest of a Putin appointee in Grozny, Chechnyan
President Ramzan Kadyrov. As the Telegraph story relates:

In the past 10 months many of his rivals have been
found dead after killings in Vienna, Istanbul, Dubai and Moscow.

Paul
Klebnikov was an editor for Forbes-Russia in Moscow. He was investigating corruption
in the Russian government, specifically in connection with expatriate and business
"oligarch" Boris
Berezovsky, who fled to Britain years before. He was shot. Berezovsky, who
once cast aspersions on Klebnikov's articles on Russian corruption, himself met
with a dubious death, either by hanging or drowning in his bathtub, after he
voiced support for Paul Litvinenko.

Yuri Shchekochikhin,
and editor writing about the corruption in Russian government, suffered a
gruesome assassination, having ingested a poison that shut down all his bodily
functions one by one and causing his skin to peel off.

There must be dozens more such murders committed
under Putin's régime that have not caught the attention of journalists (or of politicians)
in the West. Many of the killings are attributed to the Russian
"Mafia," which, from all the available evidence, acts as a kind of
"enforcer" arm for Putin's government and leaves out any role of the
FSB.

And that is but a partial exposé of Vladimir Putin,
our latest "man of peace." Not exactly a laughing matter.

Russia not only has a close relationship with
Syria's Assad, but has maintained very cordial relations with Iran, as well. It
built Iran's first nuclear reactor and has offered to build Iran another. Putin
met with Iranian President Hassan Rowhani to offer him S-300 missiles In
fact, Iran
is helping to train Syrian "rebels."

So, we are not only helping to arm the Al Queda-linked
Syrian "rebels," but may be working shoulder-to-shoulder with the
troops from another implacable enemy of the U.S., Iran, to overthrow Assad's régime.

In the meantime, Saudi Arabia has also sent arms to
the Syrian "rebels" in a continuing bid to shift the outcome of the
conflict in the Saudis' favor. As the New
York Times reported last February:

The Iranian arms transfers
have fueled worries among Sunni Arab states about losing a step to Tehran in
what has become a regional contest for primacy in Syria between Sunni Arabs and
the Iran-backed Assad government and Hezbollah of Lebanon.

What it boils down to is a contest between the Sunni
branch of Islam and the Shi'ite branch to decimate a despised third Islamic sect,
the Alawites. Assad is an Alawite, and so is his régime.

Try and figure out why Barack Obama would want to
step into this religious mess and ongoing bout for supremacy. It isn't just
about chemical weapons.

It is about ideology. And Obama has had his clock
cleaned by Putin and the rest of them.

Edward Cline, American Novelist

Edward Cline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1946. After graduating from high school (in which he learned nothing of value) and a stint in the Air Force, he pursued his ambition to become a novelist. His first detective novel, First Prize, was published in 1988 by Mysterious Press/Warner Books, and his first suspense novel, Whisper the Guns, was published in 1992 by The Atlantean Press. First Prize was republished in 2009 by Perfect Crime. The Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period has garnered critical acclaim (but not yet from the literary establishment) and universal appreciation from the reading public, including parents, teachers, students, scholars, and adult readers who believe that American history has been abandoned or is misrepresented by a government-dominated educational establishment. He is dedicated to Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason in all matters.